Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal I read a couple of weeks ago. Very interesting course:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chambers-bay-designed-to-irritate-the-pros-1432936778Quote:
The U.S. Open is known as the toughest test in golf, but this year’s championship, starting June 18 at Chambers Bay outside Tacoma, has already got some Tour pros whining.
Ian Poulter tweeted reports he’d heard that the nearly treeless links course on Puget Sound was “a farce,” even though he had yet to visit the site. “As far as the greens are concerned, it’s not a complete championship golf course,” Ryan Palmer told USA Today after an early practice round there. He singled out the slopes, mounds and swales on the putting surfaces for ridicule. “Put a quarter in the machine and go for a ride,” he said.
The pros are griping because week in and week out they make their living playing golf in a certain way, and Chambers Bay doesn’t favor that way. Modern Tour pros are extremely good at hitting golf shots precise distances, with spin and trajectory combinations that cause the ball to behave just so after landing, on fairways and greens that are usually pretty soft. At Chambers Bay, half the fun—for spectators, at least—will be watching balls bound, swerve, swoop and trickle in unpredictable directions after landing. The sand-based fescue terrain at Chambers Bay is hilly, hard and fast.
Architecturally, the course’s distinguishing feature is its flexibility. That gives Mike Davis, the guy who sets up the U.S. Open course for the U.S. Golf Association (he is also the association’s executive director), devilish new ways to get into players’ heads.
The opening hole, for example, will flip between playing as a par 4 and a par 5 on alternate days throughout the tournament, reflecting the dramatically different tee locations and landing areas that are available. Par on the adjacent 18th hole will flip each day in the opposite direction, to keep the overall par for the course at 70. The par-three ninth hole on most days will play steeply downhill, but at least once during the tournament it will play uphill from a 90-degree different angle. At No. 15, a par three that starts Chambers Bay’s dramatic closing stretch, the distance will vary from 123 yards to 246 yards.
In other words, from day to day and hole to hole, the set up will keep players off balance. They’ll never know what’s about to hit them. Another quirky possibility: teeing areas on some holes that might be slightly tilted. Players should be able to find a flat spot to tee their ball, but possibly not on the side of the tee they would prefer to use for their particular shot shape. “So that’s interesting,” Davis deadpanned at media day.
Why would the USGA set up its Open course in such a controversial manner? In part because it can. Chambers Bay, which opened just eight years ago, is the first course built in more than half a century to host an Open. The great old classic Open venues, like Oakmont and Winged Foot, have narrow fairways bordered by thick rough, dictating every shot. Chambers Bay, by contrast, was conceived by the Robert Trent Jones II design firm primarily as a match play course, with lots of fun, enticing options for the players to contend with.
“Chambers Bay is a one-of-a-kind site for an Open,” Davis said. “What the USGA is trying to do here is embrace and showcase the options that the architects have built in.”
I toured the course earlier this month with Jay Blasi, a member of the RTJII design team, and Matt Allen, the facility’s general manager. It looks wild and natural, but actually it’s a transformed gravel mine. Like Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, site of this summer’s PGA Championship, it is almost entirely artificial. Engineers moved 1.5 million cubic yards of earth to sculpt the fairways and green complexes. Every inch of the layout has been thoroughly thought out. The course hosted the 2010 U.S. Amateur, as a kind of dry run for next month’s tournament, and Blasi and Allen pointed out many of the tweaks made subsequently, in consultation with the USGA. The run-ups to several greens were softened, as on Nos. 1 and 8 where the humps and mounds were deemed too harsh. Other greens were extended to create more places to sink holes. The 7th green was lowered.
“For a U.S. Open, this is a paradigm shift,” Jones told me by telephone. “The fairways are wide but the players can’t just bomb it because the ball may roll into a bad place or leave them with a difficult angle into the green. We’re inviting them to their own destruction.”
With no trees in play and no water holes on the course, Jones said, the ground game becomes the hazard, particularly around and on the greens. As many as twelve of the greens, depending on weather conditions and the daily tee and hole locations, might best be approached with rolling ground shots rather than aerial attacks. That’s not what Tour pros are used to.
Davis loves Chambers Bay because it will force players to think. “Opens have always been a test of mental strength, along with shot-making and the short game and everything else, but here more so than prior Opens,” Davis said. “I think players will get out on the course and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t expect that. How am I going to approach this shot?’ It will be fascinating to see how they react, especially late in the championship. Thinking clearly when the heat is on is part of what identifies the all-time greats. That was one of Jack Nicklaus’s great strengths.”
Preparation will also be key. The course requires study. Davis got in trouble a few weeks ago for suggesting that players who play only one or two practice rounds on the week of the Open won’t stand much of a chance. But he was only stating the obvious. Phil Mickelson, who will be seeking the fourth leg of his career Grand Slam at Chambers Bay, showed up this week. On Thursday he spent 30 minutes on the first green alone, according to a local newspaper report.
Smart, patient players like Jordan Spieth and Graeme McDowell might fare well at Chambers Bay. More temperamental players like Poulter, dismissing the course as a joke, may already have talked themselves out of the trophy.
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